Just a Spec
A podcast about the protocols, the projects, and the people who make the open platform of the Internet possible.
Episodes
25 episodes
Deploying Your Web App…What Could Go Wrong?
Congratulations! You’ve got yourself a nice little World-Wide Web site. Now it’s time to deploy it for everyone to enjoy through their World-Wide Web browser. Easy, right? WRONG! Deploying web apps today is the portal to madness and pa...
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Episode 25
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53:16
Your Static Just Zapped Me
It's time for some acronym soup: SSG SSR CSR SPA MPA…MEAN? SSI?? PERL??? (Officially not an acronym…) If you're coming down with a headache already, trust us, you're not alone. It's…a lot. Thankfully, Ayush and Jared are here to break ...
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Episode 24
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46:55
Action Web Components for Full-Stack Magic
What if your backend could drive reactive UI changes on your frontend? Without dependencies? Without relying on any particular framework? What if your HTML could gain full-stack programming superpowers?Introducing Action Web Componen...
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Episode 23
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45:00
And Lo, There Was ARPANET (Baby Internet!)
How did the Internet first begin? Why was it developed at the Advanced Research Projects Agency? Where was it initially launched at the end of the 1960s? Is it pronounced r-OO-ter or r-OW-ter?? These and other hard-hitting questio...
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Episode 22
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39:04
The Browser Wars & an Uneasy Peace
It’s been a wild, wild ride getting from the anything goes origin story of the mainstream web—anyone still remember “Netscape Navigator” and “Trumpet Winsock”?—to today’s carefully-curated experience in the
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Episode 21
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49:49
Pendulum Swings & 2023’s State of JS
Whoa, there was one more “State of” survey from 2023 to mine for content! Who knew? Yes, the results are in, and we talk about them…but more broadly, our feelings about the state of web frameworks in our industry and the much-ballyhooed pendulu...
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Episode 20
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41:34
How Many Books Could ePub Pub if ePub Could Pub Books
What if you could take HTML & CSS, package them up in a file, and publish that file as a singular artifact? That's essentially what ePub is. (ePUB? EPUB?) With Ayush's real-world experience publishing e-books, we are guided through understa...
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Episode 19
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35:58
From Frameworks to Using the Platform with Elise Shaffer
When you've spent a good portion of your career as a web developer utilizing CSS processors & frameworks, what would lead you to embrace vanilla techniques and modern CSS features? This is the question in the air as we welcome our first eve...
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Episode 18
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48:28
HTML Finally Gets the Respect It Deserves
The results of the State of HTML 2023 survey are in! It’s an exciting time for HTML which has seen a lot of growth and expansion of capability in a welcome break with the past (when typically CSS and especially JavaScript would leapfrog the rat...
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Episode 17
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44:22
This State of Affairs
Where data lives, how to retrieve data, how to change data, how to track updates to data and provide feedback accordingly to the user…in other words, state. Web application development can necessitate a wide range of possible options for how yo...
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Episode 16
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1:17:03
The Plumbing That Makes the Web Move
Join us for a meaty conversation all about the various levels of specifications and conventions which make the World-Wide Web go: from TCP/IP to HTTP to WebSockets and beyond. We also talk about conventions in various languages and frameworks t...
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Episode 15
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1:06:26
Interop 2024 and the State of the Industry
Oh yes, we’re back! In this first Just a Spec episode of the year, the lads speculate on the grand conspiracy behind the results publication delay of State of HTML 2023 (not really!), catch up on personal news from during the podcast’s y...
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Episode 14
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1:03:16
Thankful for the Modern Web (and a CSS Course!)
Thanksgiving’s coming up here in the U.S. and we thought it’d be fun to talk about of our favorite aspects of the modern web (and how it compares to the “dark days” of old). In addition, Jared’s launched a brand-new course platform over at The ...
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Episode 13
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51:59
Naming Things
Ah yes, that notorious hard problem in computer science. Time to name some things as we talk abut the philosophy undergirding software development, why “naming things” is hard but also a core aspect of the job, the sometimes reluctance to name ...
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Episode 12
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52:14
Fast Frontend Testing, Storage, Observers, Fetch, & More
A whole grab bag of topics today! We talk about some of the well-known storage APIs like localStorage and sessionStorage, as well as the newer IndexedDB API which pairs well with Service Workers. We also talk about the three Observer APIs to he...
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Episode 11
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56:52
A State of CSS
The results of the 2023 State of CSS survey are in, and we're here to break it all down and uncover the most interesting nuggets and opportunities as we look ahead to the future of CSS and the web platform. But not before some spicy meta chat o...
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Episode 10
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1:04:54
Turbo, Astro, Server Components, and HTML Over the Wire
The lads are back with an action-packed episode full of juicy details about “buildless” architecture & “Turbo” architecture, server components, tools & techniques which encourage server-rendered HTML pages and fragments sent over the wi...
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Episode 9
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49:50
The Accessibility Tree
Gather ’round the accessibility tree, dear listeners, and hear a grand tale about roles and attributes, screen readers and DOM inspectors, and how to be a good A11Y. We also touch on why accessibility isn’t something you bolt on after you desig...
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Episode 8
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56:32
Email, Gotta Love It
We're here to deep dive into the technical underpinnings of everyone's FAVORITE internet technology: email. ;-PAmaze your nerd friends with all the exciting trivia you will learn in this action-packed episode!Hosted by
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Episode 7
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50:40
TIL About gTLDs, FTW!
It’s hard to imagine in this current world of any dot-something you could possibly imagine when looking to register a domain name, but there was once a past era of the internet when all we had was .com, .net, and .org. A dark time. A sad time. ...
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Episode 6
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29:41
Our Top Obscure (but Awesome) HTML Tags
Web developers and content authors have a rich array of tags to chose from as they build experiences using HTML. Learn about some of our favorites young and old which may pique your curiosity, as well as enjoy a spirited refresher on the import...
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Episode 5
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47:08
ActivityPub, the Fediverse, and You
Witness the rise of the Fediverse! In this episode we talk about early attempts at building decentralized social networking protocols for the web, the modern effort to craft a true W3C-published standard, challenges at scale with building out A...
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Episode 4
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44:24
I Just Wanna Write CSS
A whirlwind tour through the history of CSS, where it's landed today, and the myriad of goodies we can expect in the very near future. And do we still need pre/post-processors in this day and age, or can we just, like, y'know, write va...
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Episode 3
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48:51
In The Shadow, In The Light: DSD is Here
Not just a great Enigma song, shadow and light is the theme today as we dive deep into an exciting new frontend web specification: Declarative Shadow DOM (DSD). Having just landed in Safari as well as Chrome (crossing our fingers for Firefox su...
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Episode 2
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50:50
The Past, Present, and Future of the Form Tag
In our kickoff episode of Just a Spec, we take a look back at the early use of forms on the web to facilitate messaging and payments, the introduction of XMLHttpRequest which started the Ajax revolution, how JSON-based API calls began to veer a...
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Episode 1
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48:48